Videos by Michaela Clark
This presentation explores the visual language and practices of clinical photography through a si... more This presentation explores the visual language and practices of clinical photography through a single image published in South Africa. By tracing the original photograph I seek to reveal some of the activities involved in making both the human body and its photographic image objects of medical knowledge.
Date: 24 February 2021
Event: 1000 Words Talks; Photographic Research Network (https://developingphotoresearch.wordpress.com/video/) 85 views
The Old Groote Schuur Hospital was the largest teaching facility harnessed by Cape Town's medical... more The Old Groote Schuur Hospital was the largest teaching facility harnessed by Cape Town's medical school from 1938 to1987. But the design of this structure was notably informed by more than clinical needs. Conceived of and constructed in the decades leading up to the official implementation of apartheid (a system of governance based on racial segregation), the layout of this building embodies the racialised discourses of the country in a city whose demographic makeup troubled national norms.
This paper articulates the spatial entrenching of race-based power relations in the architectural makeup of the Old Groote Schuur Hospital. Drawing on the history of hospital design both internationally & within South Africa, it suggests that the physical layout of this built environment not only mirrored but reinforced the socio-political macrocosm that lay outside its walls.
Date: 27 May 2021
Event: International Network for the History of Hospitals (INHH) Conference "Space & the Hospital" 128 views
This talk aims to unpack the interlocking operations of the ‘predatory’ gaze of photography as it... more This talk aims to unpack the interlocking operations of the ‘predatory’ gaze of photography as it relates to the clinical camera (in general) and to its use in 20th century Cape Town, South Africa (specifically). By drawing on the history and theory of photography, I seek to articulate the power relations at work in both the photographic medium and the medical field. This is largely done by treating the practice of photography within this colonial and apartheid city in line with John Tagg’s (1988) framing of the medium as an extension of disciplinary power. In order to situate this analysis, my talk also attends to the broader practice of colonialist photography in an effort to highlight the overlapping characteristics of the clinic, the camera, and the colony in medical images of this kind.
Date: 22 February 2022
Event: The Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar's (IITG) Medical Humanities Colloquy (https://hss.iitgn.ac.in/project/medical-humanities-colloquy-5-0/) 21 views
In this presentation, I propose that tactility offers an avenue for thinking through the intimaci... more In this presentation, I propose that tactility offers an avenue for thinking through the intimacies of old photographs – even those of a clinical kind. Rather than mere medical data and copyrighted pictures, historical clinical photographs are notably highly complex and layered entities; they are remnants of lives lived and experiences had. Sometimes, these records can offer glimpses of an institutional past now forgotten, or provide evidence of a medical ‘way of seeing’; but images of a clinical kind also provide a visual trace of the individuals they depict. By unravelling the tactile and emotive dimensions of the photographic medium and its clinical output in terms of re-presentation, it is my hope to rethink contemporary attitudes towards regulating material of this kind.
Date: 7 June 2020
Event: AboutFace workshop "Emotions and Ethics: the Use and Abuse of Historical Images" 35 views
Book Chapters by Michaela Clark
The Politics of Knowledge in the Biomedical Sciences: South/African Perspectives, 2023
This chapter outlines how historical clinical photographs produced in South Africa are shaped by ... more This chapter outlines how historical clinical photographs produced in South Africa are shaped by the politics of knowledge surrounding medicine, photography, and conceptions of racial difference. By addressing the power-dynamics imbedded in an encounter with the camera, the clinic, and the colony writ large, it sets out to illustrate why and how images of this kind cannot be disconnected from concerns of exploitation and exposure. The chapter situates this argument in the specific settler-colonial and apartheid context of twentieth-century Cape Town in which a large collection of photographic material was produced within South Africa’s first medical school. While drawing on an ethos of universal science, the clinical photographs can be seen to offer evidence of the racialized logics of medicine in South Africa as well as the structuring of sight at the Old Groote Schuur Hospital (the city’s main public and teaching hospital from 1938 to 1988). By attending to a particular disease case study—that of oesophageal cancer—the chapter demonstrates how race served as a lens through which the clinical gaze of the country was focused.
Papers by Michaela Clark
De Arte, 2019
Historically framed as a "violent" medium, photography poses a series of ethical questions about ... more Historically framed as a "violent" medium, photography poses a series of ethical questions about what it means to look at vulnerable individuals. Yet, when it comes to photographs of the clinically unwell, concerns as to patient consent, private vs. public ownership, and institutional responsibility circle even more acutely. Such material speaks to what Jane Nicholas (2014, 151) has called the "fundamental tension in historical practice" – to both study and safeguard, to both reveal and hide. The aim of this article is to unpack the ethics and politics of representation as prompted by a disused collection of surgical photographs generated during the 20th century by the UCT medical school. While attending to the power-relations inherent to the photographic medium as well as the discursive terrain of medicine, my argument is that it is only in acknowledging both the vulnerability of the patients depicted as well as the artefactual value and redemptive possibilities of such images that the current and future life of difficult historical photographs can be debated. Thus, by highlighting the complex nature of this and other (clinical) collection(s), I seek to raise and grapple with the uncertainties that inherently trouble much archival photographic material today.
De Arte, 2020
While higher education (HE) institutions in South Africa have become demographically ever more di... more While higher education (HE) institutions in South Africa have become demographically ever more diverse, transcultural contact among students and staff members has seemingly failed to mend race-based prejudices and structural inequality. By acknowledging the embeddedness of symbolic violence in physical space and lived experience, this article proposes an experimental and embodied approach to critically engage with ongoing structural and symbolic prejudice. The argument is made that the physical landscape of HE institutions, as well as the lived experience of marginalised students and staff members, must be seen as the first port of call if transformation is to occur. The article argues that visual redress in the form of removing, contextualising, or adding new visual symbols is not sufficient to address the complexities of the issues involved. Embodied learning experiences using visual arts and performance processes could be included to enhance redress. The article therefore draws on the writings and thought of Nancy Fraser, Henri Lefebvre, Achille Mbembe, and various others in an attempt to sketch a theoretical framework to think through the need for and possibilities of visual, invisible, subtle, and relational redress.
Planet Bee Magazine, 2020
Photography has been used within the field of medicine to record conspicuous symptoms of disease ... more Photography has been used within the field of medicine to record conspicuous symptoms of disease since the mid-19th century. But the meaning and interpretation of these images are not limited to hospital administration, medical education, or scientific publication. This brief article asks ‘What is a clinical photograph?’ by addressing the tension between this form of medical depiction (on the one hand) and its popular as well as personal dimensions (on the other). Ultimately, I propose to show that historical photographs of patients are complex images that cannot simply be labelled ‘clinical’.
Talks by Michaela Clark
Not Safe For Publication Podcast, 2021
Listen to the Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-290300378/michaela-clark
Online Work by Michaela Clark
AboutFace Blog, 2020
'Why we should think about touch' is a short post that offers context to the paper 'Trace, Tissue... more 'Why we should think about touch' is a short post that offers context to the paper 'Trace, Tissue, Touch: what it means to look at historical clinical photographs' - a paper presented at the workshop ‘Emotions and Ethics: the Use and Abuse of Historical Images’ organised by AboutFace. Full post (plus presentation video) here: https://aboutfaceyork.com/why-think-about-touch/
BSHS Twitter Conference, 2020
Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/BSHSNews/status/1227508994635423746?s=20
Clinical photograph... more Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/BSHSNews/status/1227508994635423746?s=20
Clinical photographs play a crucial role in #histmed. More than objective records, these scientific images also operate cultural artefacts. Join me in discovering what it means to both sort and study an orphaned collection of this kind. #visualstudies #materialculture #archive 📸
Blog: https://curatingtheclinical.wordpress.com/
This blog serves as a means to record, process,... more Blog: https://curatingtheclinical.wordpress.com/
This blog serves as a means to record, process, and receive feedback on a PhD project titled 'Curating the Clinical: A Material Investigation of Cape Town’s Historical Medical Photographs' that seeks to both practically and theoretically engage an unarchived collection of 20th century clinical photographic records.
In order to remedy the 'orphan' nature of the disused collection, this PhD project seeks to develop a practice-based method that would allow for it to be transformed into a resource for the Humanities. This blog offers a means to trace the development of the archival process.
I thank the University of Manchester Presidential Doctoral Scholarship as well as the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust for their financial contributions to this project.
Hektoen International, 2018
Link: http://hekint.org/2018/03/15/seeing-things-differently-reflection-clinical-photography/
UCT Pathology Learning Centre Surgical Photographs, 2018
Conference Abstracts by Michaela Clark
Science and Photography Symposium, St Andrews, Scotland, 2019
This paper is an overview of an ongoing PhD project that seeks to sort and study a collection of ... more This paper is an overview of an ongoing PhD project that seeks to sort and study a collection of disused clinical photographs created by the University of Cape Town's (UCT) medical school in South Africa. Produced by the university between 1920 and 1980, these photographs depict the bodies of patients via various representational modes: frontal and profile images of heads, veiled limbs and torsos, disembodied organs, as well as x-rays are featured in black and white, mounted on cardboard backings, and annotated with details of both patients and signs of disease. But little information regarding their institutional making, use, or original order exist. By taking the collection as a series of visual and material artefacts, this paper sketches the contemporary problematics and potentials of working with an orphaned collection of this kind. In particular, it draws on the work of Elizabeth Edwards (1999-2016), Barbara Voss (2012), and Carolyn Hamilton and Pippa Skotnes (2014) to describe a possible mode of theoretical and applied engagement – that of curatorial research practice. The paper thus ultimately seeks to grapple with the medical, ethical, visual, historical and archival complexities inherent to transforming a decontextualised collection of clinical photographs into a resource for the Medical Humanities.
DESIGNING APARTHEID (Workshop): Interrogating the relationship between design and apartheid, its origins, effects, and legacies
This paper seeks to address how the architectural ordering of Groote Schuur Hospital was both inf... more This paper seeks to address how the architectural ordering of Groote Schuur Hospital was both informed by and perpetuated racialised discourses and embodied experiences in peri-apartheid Cape Town. Built as a segregated space in 1938, the physical layout of this institution notably mirrored the socio-political macrocosm that lay outside hospital walls. My discussion is an attempt to map a theoretical and contextual framework to engage the manner in which power is spatially entrenched in the physical and visible landscape of the Old Medical Building. Drawing on new materialism, socio-spatial theory, and semiotics, this paper seeks to acknowledge and unpack the embedded nature of epistemological violence in physical space. Although this paper provides a historical study of the power-relations associated with racialised clinical space, my argument extends to link this concern to greater representational consequences within Cape Town's medical history. In particular, I seek to forge a connection between the medium and practice of photography as a 'technology of power' (Tagg 1988) in the greater discursive framing of race and pathology in South Africa.
SSHM (Society for the Social History of Medicine), 2018
This paper in an enquiry into an archive of disused historical clinical photographs that original... more This paper in an enquiry into an archive of disused historical clinical photographs that originally served as teaching aids for the benefit of student doctors at the University of Cape Town's medical school in South Africa. By engaging selected photographs from this collection in relation to psycho-social notions of health and disease, I attempt to locate how photographic practices seek to render the patient-body a passive object of medical knowledge. But, unlike most encounters with clinical images of this kind, this investigation strives to examine how such representations may speak beyond both their clinical use (as diagnostic tools) as well as their archival value (as mere remnants of the past). Through a close reading, the discussion focuses on extra-clinical and emotive details otherwise denied by both diagnostic and historical interpretations. As such, it seeks to address the current life of this photographic collection – how clinical depictions of patients may speak beyond their medical and historical purposes. While acknowledging the disciplinary motivations to produce this visual material – as well as the usefulness thereof as a historical record – the paper ultimately examines how patient-photographs may offer up points of fracture that can offset and even resist both a medical and historical gaze. By addressing the affective potential of this material, I attempt to provide an opportunity for human subjectivity (of both the viewed and the viewer) to be retrieved from the objectifying tendencies of medicine and history.
JASMed (Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine), 2014
The field of medicine can be seen as having historically taken part in the construction of a bodi... more The field of medicine can be seen as having historically taken part in the construction of a bodily dichotomy based on health and pathology – concepts that to a large extent hinge on notions of difference and deviance. Within the South African context, the historical construction of the normative, healthy, white subject was one maintained by the nation-state through the production of a degenerate 'other' in accordance with the country's colonial and apartheid past. With regards to South Africa's medical history, it thus becomes clear how within discourses surrounding nationhood and subjectivity diseased bodies became burdened by associations of racial and social, as well as physical impurity. This paper is an attempt to uncover the ideological undercurrent within the photographs of syphilitic patients that form part of the 'Saint Surgical Collection' currently housed at the University of Cape Town. Dated from the 1920s to 1960s, these representations are indicative not only of how the pathologised body is visually rendered an object for the medical gaze, but also how these supposedly neutral images are charged with socio-political implications. As such, these photographs provide insight not only into the attitudes surrounding a highly conspicuous, ideologically loaded (and for a long time incurable) disease, but also how these patients embody notions of the unhealthy 'other'. Although principally founded on racial difference, the photographic collection illustrates how deviance is expanded to include sexuality, class, and culture and thereby illuminates how the white, moral, bourgeois, and (above all) healthy national subject was maintained in relational terms.
PAPER PRESENTED AT JASMED (JOINT ATLANTIC SEMINAR FOR THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE), JOHNS HOPKINS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, 3-4 OCTOBER 2014
SAHMS (Southern Association for the History of Medicine), 2017
This paper in an enquiry into an archive of disused historical clinical photographs within the Sa... more This paper in an enquiry into an archive of disused historical clinical photographs within the Saint Surgical Pathology Collection (SSC) that originally served as teaching aids for the benefit of student doctors at the University of Cape Town's medical school in South Africa. Focusing on images of patients diagnosed with syphilis produced during the 1940s, this critical visual enquiry addresses both the historical and current life of this photographic collection. Set against a backdrop of a psycho-social notions of health and disease, this paper engages the visual coding of syphilis in relation to Cape Town's medical history as well as the developing conventions of photography within the sciences. However, via a close reading of selected photographs, it extends to examine how such representations may speak beyond their institutional use. While this paper thus unpacks the photographic depiction of syphilis as an attempt to render the patient-body a passive object of medical knowledge, it likewise addresses their affective potential. Seeking to (re)address these photographs, the discussion focuses on extra-clinical and emotive details otherwise denied by diagnostic readings. By privileging the subjectivity of patients depicted in the SSC, this critically engagement sees how such images may speak beyond their historical medical purpose. Thus, while acknowledging the disciplinary motivations of the medical gaze, this paper ultimately examines how patient-photographs offer up points of fracture that offset and even resist a medical gaze – instead providing an opportunity for the human subject to be retrieved from the objectifying tendencies of medicine.
Reviews by Michaela Clark
ARO (Annali Reviews Online), 2022
Anatomy of the Medical Image (2021) is Clio Medica's most recent contribution to an established l... more Anatomy of the Medical Image (2021) is Clio Medica's most recent contribution to an established literature on visual representation in the history of medicine. Edited by Axel Fliethmann and Christiane Weller, the book is the product of an international conference hosted in 2017 by Monash University, Melbourne. The contributing authors to this publication span numerous geographic contexts (Australia, China, Germany, North America, and the United Kingdom) as well as academic traditions (History, Literature, Language, and Art). The result is a publication that thus offers diverse perspectives for reading images in medicine as well as medical imagery in visual culture.
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Videos by Michaela Clark
Date: 24 February 2021
Event: 1000 Words Talks; Photographic Research Network (https://developingphotoresearch.wordpress.com/video/)
This paper articulates the spatial entrenching of race-based power relations in the architectural makeup of the Old Groote Schuur Hospital. Drawing on the history of hospital design both internationally & within South Africa, it suggests that the physical layout of this built environment not only mirrored but reinforced the socio-political macrocosm that lay outside its walls.
Date: 27 May 2021
Event: International Network for the History of Hospitals (INHH) Conference "Space & the Hospital"
Date: 22 February 2022
Event: The Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar's (IITG) Medical Humanities Colloquy (https://hss.iitgn.ac.in/project/medical-humanities-colloquy-5-0/)
Date: 7 June 2020
Event: AboutFace workshop "Emotions and Ethics: the Use and Abuse of Historical Images"
Book Chapters by Michaela Clark
Papers by Michaela Clark
Talks by Michaela Clark
Online Work by Michaela Clark
Clinical photographs play a crucial role in #histmed. More than objective records, these scientific images also operate cultural artefacts. Join me in discovering what it means to both sort and study an orphaned collection of this kind. #visualstudies #materialculture #archive 📸
This blog serves as a means to record, process, and receive feedback on a PhD project titled 'Curating the Clinical: A Material Investigation of Cape Town’s Historical Medical Photographs' that seeks to both practically and theoretically engage an unarchived collection of 20th century clinical photographic records.
In order to remedy the 'orphan' nature of the disused collection, this PhD project seeks to develop a practice-based method that would allow for it to be transformed into a resource for the Humanities. This blog offers a means to trace the development of the archival process.
I thank the University of Manchester Presidential Doctoral Scholarship as well as the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust for their financial contributions to this project.
For more, visit our digital showcase of the UCT Department of Surgery's Collection of 20th Century Clinical Photographs here: http://surgeryclinicalphotos.uct.ac.za/
Conference Abstracts by Michaela Clark
PAPER PRESENTED AT JASMED (JOINT ATLANTIC SEMINAR FOR THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE), JOHNS HOPKINS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, 3-4 OCTOBER 2014
Reviews by Michaela Clark
Date: 24 February 2021
Event: 1000 Words Talks; Photographic Research Network (https://developingphotoresearch.wordpress.com/video/)
This paper articulates the spatial entrenching of race-based power relations in the architectural makeup of the Old Groote Schuur Hospital. Drawing on the history of hospital design both internationally & within South Africa, it suggests that the physical layout of this built environment not only mirrored but reinforced the socio-political macrocosm that lay outside its walls.
Date: 27 May 2021
Event: International Network for the History of Hospitals (INHH) Conference "Space & the Hospital"
Date: 22 February 2022
Event: The Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar's (IITG) Medical Humanities Colloquy (https://hss.iitgn.ac.in/project/medical-humanities-colloquy-5-0/)
Date: 7 June 2020
Event: AboutFace workshop "Emotions and Ethics: the Use and Abuse of Historical Images"
Clinical photographs play a crucial role in #histmed. More than objective records, these scientific images also operate cultural artefacts. Join me in discovering what it means to both sort and study an orphaned collection of this kind. #visualstudies #materialculture #archive 📸
This blog serves as a means to record, process, and receive feedback on a PhD project titled 'Curating the Clinical: A Material Investigation of Cape Town’s Historical Medical Photographs' that seeks to both practically and theoretically engage an unarchived collection of 20th century clinical photographic records.
In order to remedy the 'orphan' nature of the disused collection, this PhD project seeks to develop a practice-based method that would allow for it to be transformed into a resource for the Humanities. This blog offers a means to trace the development of the archival process.
I thank the University of Manchester Presidential Doctoral Scholarship as well as the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust for their financial contributions to this project.
For more, visit our digital showcase of the UCT Department of Surgery's Collection of 20th Century Clinical Photographs here: http://surgeryclinicalphotos.uct.ac.za/
PAPER PRESENTED AT JASMED (JOINT ATLANTIC SEMINAR FOR THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE), JOHNS HOPKINS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, 3-4 OCTOBER 2014
Available: https://networks.h-net.org/node/9782/reviews/10629277/clark-edwards-photographs-and-practice-history
Visit: https://thepolyphony.org/2020/07/20/not-looking-at-historical-medical-images/
photographs emerge in this discussion as decisively structured and composed, I likewise address how the 'Syphilis' images offer a way of seeing beyond their institutional use. While acknowledging the disciplinary motivations of the Foucauldian medical gaze, my argument ultimately privileges the subjects of these images while critically considering how the conspicuous nature of this disease may have seen it pose a particular threat to a notion of stable subjecthood. This was especially the case in the context of 20th century South Africa where those most vulnerable to the disease were in many respects second-class citizens. Ultimately, this investigation seeks to (re)address the SSC in an attempt to unpack how these photographs may speak beyond their historical medical purpose. By examining how photographic representations of patients provide a means of seeing beyond their institutional intent, I suggest ways in which these images offer up points of fracture that offset and even resist a medical gaze and instead provide an opportunity for the human subject to be retrieved from the objectifying tendencies of medicine.